Tag Archives: psychiatry

Mental health patients complain of ‘zombification’

Excessive use of forced detention and coerced treatment by the NHS means patients have little control over their treatment. “I became ‘zombified’ for nearly 12 months when I was forced to take mood stabilisers and antipsychotic medication,” says Reka Krieg. The 30-year-old has bipolar disorder, so has periods of manic activity and psychotic episodes, which led to her being forcibly detained and treated in hospital in 2009. Krieg’s case exemplifies the crisis in NHS psychiatric care, which is resulting in excessive use of coercive detention and treatment of people with mental illness. Latest statistics released in January show a 17.5% rise in the number of people being “sectioned” – under the Mental Health Act (MHA) – from 32,649 in 2008‑09 to 38,369 in 2009-10. This means that nearly 40% of patients in NHS psychiatric units are there under legal duress.

Psychiatry has devolved from personalized therapy to shameless drug dealing

The entire field of psychiatry has been on a downward spiral for years, though, as the “Disease Mongering Engine” literally invents new diseases every year — which are really just normal, everyday human behaviors that vary based on personality, by the way — and comes up with drug interventions to treat them. It is a highly lucrative drug dealing business that profits at the expense of human health. To see a psychiatrist in today’s environment is like playing Russian Roulette with your health. If able to evaluate every person on the planet, the average psychiatrist would surely find a problem or two with each one. And within five-to-ten minutes, he or she would be able to prescribe a laundry list of medications to treat those alleged disorders. So in other words, if you value your health, stay far, far away from modern-day psychiatrists.

Talk Doesn’t Pay, So Psychiatry Turns Instead to Drug Therapy

A 2005 government survey found that just 11 percent of psychiatrists provided talk therapy to all patients, a share that had been falling for years and has most likely fallen more since. Psychiatric hospitals that once offered patients months of talk therapy now discharge them within days with only pills.

Recent studies suggest that talk therapy may be as good as or better than drugs in the treatment of depression, but fewer than half of depressed patients now get such therapy compared with the vast majority 20 years ago. Insurance company reimbursement rates and policies that discourage talk therapy are part of the reason. A psychiatrist can earn $150 for three 15-minute medication visits compared with $90 for a 45-minute talk therapy session.

Competition from psychologists and social workers — who unlike psychiatrists do not attend medical school, so they can often afford to charge less — is the reason that talk therapy is priced at a lower rate. There is no evidence that psychiatrists provide higher quality talk therapy than psychologists or social workers.

The hidden tyranny: children diagnosed and drugged for profit

Thomas Edison, one of the world’s most prolific inventors, was kicked out of school at an early age as his teacher lost patience with his persistent questions and wandering mind. Where would we be now if his creative spirit had been numbed by prescription drugs? Albert Einstein, father of modern physics, was a quiet child who kept his distance from his peers. He resented the rote learning methods enforced in school and was labeled a foolish day dreamer. Imagine if he had been medicated into conformity. Winston Churchill, the great statesman and orator, had an independent and rebellious nature as a youth and was often in trouble. Surely he would have been deemed ODD (Oppositional Defiant Disorder) by today’s psychiatric standards. Frederick Douglass, one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement (and a blood relative of Umar R. Abdullah-Johnson, quoted above) began defying the rules for blacks when he was a child. And the list goes on.

What’s A Mental Disorder? Even Experts Can’t Agree

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, updated roughly every 15 years, has detailed descriptions of all the mental disorders officially recognized by psychiatry. It’s used by psychiatrists, insurance companies, drug researchers, the courts and even schools.

But it’s not without controversy: The proposed changes suggested this year have sparked a kind of civil war within psychiatry.

In a small condo on the beach in San Diego lives Allen Frances, who blames himself for what he calls the “Epidemic of Asperger’s.” Frances edited the last edition of the DSM, and he’s also the new DSM’s most prominent critic. Frances is the one who put the word Asperger’s in the DSM in the first place, thereby making it an official mental disorder